U.S. Broke Law on Water Deals, Judge Rules

In the latest ruling in a long-running court case, a U.S. judge has found that the federal government violated environmental laws when it renewed long-term contracts for a group of irrigation districts that get water from the San Joaquin River.

The 78-page opinion, issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton in Sacramento, found that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 2001 contract renewal was “arbitrary and capricious” and that two federal wildlife agencies had failed to fully analyze the environmental effects of the water deliveries.

The conservation groups that filed the suit say the irrigation diversions have not only destroyed salmon runs on the San Joaquin, one of the state’s largest rivers, but are also harming downstream fisheries in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Karlton did not order a remedy for the violations, leaving that to later proceedings in a case now 17 years old.

The same judge in 1997 struck down an earlier version of the contracts, which govern long-term deliveries to more than two dozen irrigation and water districts in the Friant division of the Central Valley Project, a massive federal water project that supplies much of California agriculture.

In another ruling in the case last year, Karlton found that the Bureau of Reclamation had violated fisheries protections by drying up much of the San Joaquin to send water to farmers for the last six decades. A trial is scheduled for next year to determine how much water should be left in the river, which historically supported a bountiful salmon run.

In this week’s ruling, Karlton agreed with environmental groups that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service had failed to follow Endangered Species Act requirements when both agencies issued biological opinions that the irrigation deliveries would not seriously harm chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead and other species.

“This new ruling rejects the government’s attempt to ignore the true impacts of these long-term water contracts, especially their wide-ranging impact on downstream fisheries and endangered species,” said Hamilton Candee, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of a number of environmental groups pressing the case.

Spokesmen for all three federal agencies said their attorneys were reviewing the decision and had no comment. Greg Wilkinson, an attorney for the Friant Water Users Assn., which represents the irrigators, said, “There are some real oddities in the ruling.” He cited the judge’s pronouncements on critical habitat and water quantities.

Karlton faulted the Fish and Wildlife Service for basing its environmental assessment on the amount of water actually delivered to irrigators in recent years, instead of the much larger quantities that the contracts allow for.

But Wilkinson said those larger deliveries would only infrequently be possible, in very wet years. “He wants it analyzed as if there’s more water in the river than the river actually holds” much of the time, he said.

The Friant agreements were the first of more than 200 Central Valley Project contracts that the Bureau of Reclamation is renewing in a process that has been severely criticized by environmentalists. They say the government is promising Central Valley agribusiness more water than the environment can bear, charging farmers too little for it and writing the contracts for too long a period. The 25-year pacts contain an automatic renewal clause, meaning they will probably be in effect for half a century.